Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Edvard Beneš

“ We cannot and will not continue to live under the direct and indirect rule of the violators of Belgium, France, and Serbia, the would-be-murderers of Russia and Roumania, the murderers of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers of our blood, and the accomplices in numberless unspeakable crimes committed in this war against humanity by the two degenerate and irresponsible dynasties. ”

“ The world knows the history of our struggle against the Habsburg oppression, intensified and systematized by the Austro-Hungarian Dualistic Compromise of 1867. This dualism is only a shameless organization of brute force and exploitation of the majority by the minority ”

“ We do this because of our belief that no people should be forced to live under a sovereignty they do not recognize, and because of our knowledge and firm conviction that our nation cannot freely develop in a Habsburg mock-federation, which is only a new form of the denationalizing oppression under which we have suffered for the past three hundred years. ”

“ The Church shall be separated from the State. Our democracy shall rest on universal suffrage; women shall be placed on an equal footing with men, politically, socially, and culturally. The rights of the minority shall be safeguarded by proportional representation; national minorities shall enjoy equal rights. The government shall be parliamentary in form and shall recognize the principles of initiative and referendum. The standing army will be replaced by militia.
The Czechoslovak Nation will carry out far-reaching social and economic reforms ”

“ We claim the right of Bohemia to be reunited with her Slovak brethren of Slovakia, once part of our national State, later torn from our national body, and fifty years ago incorporated in the Hungarian State of the Magyars, who, by their unspeakable violence and ruthless oppression of their subject races have lost all moral and human right to rule anybody but themselves. ”